Beginning of Jet Set Brunch & DYI Pot-Pourri

Hello happy readers! Welcome to Jet Set Brunch and I invite you to join me on my journey in discovering the best food and adventures around the world!

This is my first ever post, and I was stuck on deciding what shall I write about first. So I’m taking things back, like way back, to 2013 to a quick DYI experiment with pot-pourri!

I kept thinking to myself ‘what can I do to preserve these flowers forever?’ I mean flowers are so beautiful and everyone loves flowers! As much as I water my flowers, trying to delay their dying process, it’s sad enough to know that nothing lives or last forever. So how can I preserve these flowers as long as possible?

I tried googling answers to see what I can do to flowers. A YouTube video shows exactly what you can do to them and the best way is to press and dry them! Of course, why didn’t I think of that?

Pressing Flowers Tutorial to watch a video to how you can dry your flowers at home and you can keep them forever and ever! It’s so simple. And here are just a few steps of how I pressed my own flowers at home.

Step 1: Pick the flowers that you like the most and something that is still fairly alive. And cut the stalks if you have to because the petals are the most important parts.

Step 2: Take an A4 piece of paper and fold it in half and place the flowers on the right side, cover it. Place a large tissue paper over the A4 paper (this will help with absorbing the water from the flowers) and press them down slightly.

Step 3: This part is kind of weird, but it works! With your pressed flowers in the A4 piece of paper put them inside the microwave, and take a big microwaveable plate and put the flat side of it onto the flowers. By doing this, you are essentially making your flowers very flat and straight because of the weight of the plate. And that’s what you are trying to achieve.

Step 4: For bigger flowers set the microwave at 1 minute, but for smaller and fragile flowers set the microwave at 30 to 45 seconds. The heat of the microwave should evaporate the water from the flowers or at least release the liquid from the flowers, and by using the tissue paper helps it absorb most of the released liquid.

Step 5: After that’s done, take the flowers out of the microwave gently, it should still be slightly wet and it shouldn’t stick so much to the paper. Open both paper, and you should find quite ‘soggy’ flowers. This is good. That just means a lot of the water from the flowers has been released. Now you just need to set them aside and wait for it to dry over night. It should turn out quite crispy and delicate after.

These are the before and after of some other flowers that I’ve pressed.

It’s so simple and quite creative and you can do it yourself at home! At least now I will have a little piece of something that was once alive with me for a long time. This is a great way of keeping objects as a symbolism for sentimental memories.